Dear Deshaun Watson

 

I haven't come anywhere approaching close to talking about my feelings vis-a-vis Deshaun Watson. In a lot of ways it's because I'm a hypocrite and I'm afraid to get myself canceled before I've even got myself launched. But that's not really true. It's because I haven't wanted to confront my feelings and end up finding myself coming to a conclusion with which I'm uncomfortable.

I haven't, in a lot of words, wanted to find my cognitive dissonance in these pages.

Vacillating on whether any of these NFL teams is actually any good each week is enough – thank you.

But as you very likely already know, Deshaun Watson has been found guilty of no wrongdoing in front of two Grand Juries. And as you may or may not know, and as I only believe because I've heard knowledgeable people say so: Grand Juries are designed to indict. That's the point.

The entire reason you, as an attorney, take a case before a Grand Jury is because you want a jury that knows it's about to set precedent for the entire nation. As my memory has it, all it took Gay Marriage was to get before a Grand Jury for our entire societal perception of Gayness as it is to make a total 180.

This isn't Bob Loblaw's Law Blog, though.

I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. That's actually true of everything that comes out of my mouth – and my fingertips as the case may be.

But this is my blog, and one of the things I told myself I was going to do if I was going to do this thing was be perfectly honest with you and with myself. So that's what I'm going to try to do, now.

I thought this out very carefully yesterday. To be perfectly frank, I ranted about it for like four hours at my girlfriend. She's still sleeping off the mental exhaustion. (I'm sorry, if you're reading this.)

Something like six months ago I got myself banned from another Twitter account for engaging in an unproductive conversation about Deshaun Watson and sexual misconduct. I let myself get in my feelings rather than evaluating them. It took me the intervening time to get out of them. But, essentially, I reacted poorly to someone saying that they didn't understand how we don't think of Deshaun Watson's alleged misconduct as violent.

I've been evaluating that sentiment since.

For what it's worth, I responded that Watson's alleged misconduct isn't an act of violence. If anything, it's coercion, and no matter how bad it may feel to do something we've been coerced into, it isn't a crime. And I think his juries agreed with the next conclusion: It can't be a crime.

How can I say that?

There was a part of me that was appalled to hear it, too. I am a “victim” as it were of coerced sexual activity. It sucks. You feel gross after. It's a stain on the spirit and in the mind that will never go away. And it's taken me all these intervening years – and learning of Deshaun Watson's juries' decisions – to come to the realization that my coercer owes me no restitution.

Because that's what it's about.

Our criminal system is one based on restitution for wrongdoing. This is supposed to be a football blog, so you as a reader probably don't want me to go into detail about how our legal system is an evolution of the Danelaw which was established in Angland by the colonizing (invading) Vikings and how, because of the decentralization of the “colonies” misconduct within the community was assigned a fiduciary penalty. There's criticism about this kind of government because naturally the Rich get away with misconduct the poor could never imagine getting away with – but there were always Trials by Ordeal. Back then, anyway.

But I wonder whether Deshaun Watson isn't going through his own sort of Trial by Ordeal.

What was a Trial by Ordeal?

Basically, what would happen is – if you were accused of wrongdoing, say of misconducting yourself sexually with upward of 40 women in the community – you would have to undergo an often horrifically painful, forever disfiguring, life-threatening ordeal. The favorite of the Christian era was to make the defendant hold a red-hot iron in their hand and walk a certain distance. The wound would then be checked the next day for infection. If you weren't infected – if the wound were healing properly, and it's even recorded that some people would have no wound at all upon inspection – you were innocent of the alleged misconduct. The idea is that if your soul is clean of wrongdoing, the injury will heal properly. If, however, your soul is tainted with misdeed, that taint will result in an infected or improperly healing wound.

It makes a certain amount of sense.

It also self-selects the guilty. Because if you aren't willing to restore the alleged injured party through their spending power in the community then at least they get to watch you carry a red-hot iron with everyone in town. (I mean, if you killed someone's pig or whatever, that was lost income; it makes sense today as much as it did 1000 years ago; like I said, we're still using this system.) It requires a particular kind of cruelty to watch an innocent person destroy themselves in public.

Why am I talking this out like this? You have to be wondering why you've made it four pages into a football blog and instead you're reading about Medieval, Viking Crime and Punishment.

The real reason is that as I put the context of why we respond to crime the way we do – to Manslaughter, for instance, by attaching a particular fine the guilty party has to pay to the victim's family or just to the State – together in my mind, there are difficult questions I have to ask myself.

Is my rapist a Rapist?

Thinking to yourself, “If I do this and just get it over with, even if it's bad, it will be over and done with” before agreeing in a sort of passive half-no manner is not saying no. It is, in fact, the terms and conditions of the employment contract nearly every employee in the world makes with their employer. Is that coercion? Is that prostitution? Yes. And Yes. Should that be illegal? Until the word no is said, there's no rape. And our culture has kind of agreed that Date Rape isn't Real Rape.

It is.

But it also isn't a violent crime punishable with the rules of violent crimes.

That's the thing. That's where the wicket gets sticky. Which is apparently the worst kind of wicket you can have. (whatever the fuck a wicket is.)

The one thing I think any parent of more than two children can tell you is that fairness is a sliding scale. Rules are only as good as how well they are thought out – and sticking to them is only as consistent as your ability to argue for them.

Is the sexual misconduct of a college freshman who doesn't realize that I'm saying no with my body language – body language which even I have to admit to myself was illegible at best, confusing at worst – punishable at all? Do I deserve some percentage of their income? Because I did something I came to regret later? Which I regretted immediately?

I don't think so.

So let's pivot to the culture, because this is getting personal and I don't think anyone wants that. I know what it's like for me when I read other people's traumatic or unpleasant sexual encounters.

Our culture is a self-devouring viper. A malefic ouroboros. From an unpopular psychological standpoint, our very society typifies the Devouring Mother.

I went looking for a quick summary of the Devouring Mother and found a very good blog entry from 2018. It's actually about Idiot Compassion – a term I often call Bourgoise Guilt. I would love to quote from it extensively, but I'm providing the link so I don't have to. (the grammar errors are the author's) https://andrewpgsweeny.medium.com/idiot-compassion-and-the-devouring-mother-3dbe2b1dc688

“The one who practices idiot compassion, also practices victimology, and loves to define other people — and themselves especially — as victims; they play the game of identifying and propping up victims. Victimhood absolves one from responsibility and, at worst, conjures up the dark power of the mob. The greatest monsters of the world have known this power of idiot compassion to bend people to their will, and to create a world defined by oppressors and victims.”

And because I'm an ass, his closing statement: “What then is the remedy for victimology and idiot compassion? In Man’s Search For Meaning, Victor Frankl eloquently wrote of how the inner choice to act with integrity is possible even when every kind of external freedom has been taken away, and in the worst of all circumstances — in his case a concentration camp: 'Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.'”

I was going to use this piece anyway. But those two paragraphs are exactly what I wanted to talk about with this piece.

Deshaun Watson is three things that make him an extremely attractive target to our culture. He is 1) a young black man, 2) talented and successful; the kind of young man you can predict earning generational wealth, specifically the kind of wealth the NFL has been trying to prevent black men from getting, and 3) an otherwise completely Upright citizen.

There are a lot of people who want to use the NFL as their punching bag, to Straw Man anything the NFL does into a critical blow to “change the culture” of the United States. I can't think of any of those people – but those particular campaigns are all deserving of ridicule. In my opinion.

NFL players “get away” with an inordinate amount of violence toward women and children. To a certain way of thinking, playing football at all is a gateway drug to violence in your personal life.

Everything is true from a certain way of thinking.

But these people are making the wrong cause-effect correlation. First of all, males are violent. Violent males self-select for violent outlets.

When I was 12, my personal best season of football, I was 6'1” and weighed 90 pounds. I played defensive tackle. I routinely lined up against kids who were no joke 2 to 300 pounds or more. And I beat them routinely, too. Because I was filled with rage and contempt for humanity, but most of all for my self.

I also spent the entire season hurting from some nagging injury or other. (That has next to nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It is how I think about undersized quarterbacks, though.)

The point is that I was playing because I couldn't punch the kids in my class who bullied me (anymore. I was in too much trouble for the very few fights I did get in – and which I never initiated but always won. Because you can't punch the rich kids. But you can tackle em in pads. They don't don't love it any more. But I didn't get in trouble. Sometimes I even got praised.). (Humblebrag, I know. That's my father speaking. He leaks into my football brain, and for good reason. It isn't that he's reading these.) I was playing football – and not allowed to play baseball and basketball – as a child because I was looking for a violet outlet.

I once worked for a guy who would remark every single Saturday that the NFL self-selects not for talent but for guys who are willing to go through the punishment to their bodies. (Literally every Saturday. He had a problem. I'm not sure what it was, but it was like being in 50 First Dates. Actually, it was more like that than I was originally going to say; there's no way I would be attracted enough to him to go on 50 first dates, either.)

I have wandered so far afield.

Right. Football doesn't self-select for violence. Most of the men who make it to the League have, in Jungian terms, integrated their Shadows. That is, they've learned to isolate and channel that violent impulse on the practice field and on Sundays.

I'm working myself up to say something controversial. So I'm just going to say it. The people who are targeting Deshaun Watson, from his accusers to their team of lawyers to media personalities, are motivated to do so for reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with Deshaun Watson and his behavior in the particular moments or overarching situation.

There is a lot of money in Progressive Feminism.

Which is exactly the kind of thing a Men's Rights advocate would say. I know the accusations I'm going to receive. I got banned from Twitter because I, the victim of regular sexual abuses at the hands of varied people over the course of my life, reacted to the accusation that I am a defender of Rape Culture by telling a guy to “Go get violently fucked.”

I have strong feelings about this.

Because the NFL is a battleground for so many different causes, there are a lot of things I am expected to feel about this whole thing. Especially as a “victim” myself. I'm supposed to identify with the “victims” But without breaking it down any more granularly than I need to in order to say it, I don't think most of them are valid and the rest are any of my damn business. The best I can make out through this whole thing, the crime that Deshaun Watson committed was having a kink.

Kink is called kink for a reason. Like a kink in a hose, it's a twist or a jag or an unusual turn in a person's sexual psychology. And I seem to remember our culture falling on the side of “no kink shaming” after that book about the sexy fascist and the nerdy girl who didn't understand how consent works.

From the worst of my understanding of what I have read, the crime that Deshaun Watson committed was indicating his erection, suggesting that the girls touch it, or I seem to remember him putting one of their hands on it. This is crossing a line, for sure. But I have a few thoughts about how solid that line was, and whether there was an expectation that that line existed.

This whole thing... it opens the door to an impossible number of conversations that our culture needs to have all at once. We have extremely outdated ideals regarding sex. Specifically our ideals are Puritanical and can be dated directly back to the damn 17^th century. And they can be dated back—

I've been listening to Tom Holland (the author, of Dominion and In the Shadow of the Sword fame, not Spider-Man) talk about how Christianity has remade the entire world through colonialism and proselytization (a wildly strange word I should research but I'm not going to) lately, and it's naturally influenced the way I'm going to move forward with how I think about the world, but specifically how I pursue this piece.

In the Roman world, non-Male Citizens were considered urinalis – literally, urinals. A Male Citizen could do with a non-Male Citizen what he liked, up to and including disposing of his bodily fluids in them. Specifically his sexual fluids.

Why is this relevant today?

Because the men who built the world in which we currently reside were obsessed with the Romans and the Roman way of life. Specifically Roman masculinity. I live in Ohio, so I'm reminded of it every time I hear the name Cincinnati – which isn't infrequently; not especially now that I've decided I'm riding the Bengals' wagon til the wheels fall off. Cincinnati is named after the Roman hero Cincinnatus, because, like the city of Rome, there are evidently three hills in Cincinnati.

They were obsessed.

And that means they were obsessed with recreating the sexual liberation of the upper class – particularly of males. I'm ripping Tom Holland off, here, almost directly in my mind (and for that I'm only sort of sorry). I've thought these things independently. His is just the only voice I've heard confirm them. So I can't say, like, (in my highest falutin' poorly-imitated British accent:) “according to the mumbled School of Mumbledinghamingshireton...” or whatever. So whatever. Moving on.

That's what the Sexual Revolution was all about: making 13 year old girls available sexually to the very men they were originally made unavailable to. And 13 year-old girls were made unavailable to adult men for extremely good reasons. None least of which that no 13 year-old girl is going to turn down the economic security of a relationship with a fully-adult male – not when permanent economic security are weighed against the whims of 13-year old boys!

So whether you take the stance that adult men should not be engaging in sexual congress with adolescent and teenaged girls because teenaged and adolescent males need to be allowed fair opportunity to get their “at-bats” as it were, or because you think it's morally wrong for an adult to engage in sexual congress with a child, the problem still presents itself: the rich and powerful are going to do whatever the actual fuck they feel like doing. Because the penalty is fiduciary. A resource of which they have effectively infinite reserves.

And here we cut back to Deshaun Watson. If I were clever, I would put that picture of him sitting there in his ugly brown jacket and the wrong-orange tie that weirdly matched his pen right here. I would make you see his face juxtaposed with that bolded and italicized clause.

But that would be manipulative.

Because I think the thing that Deshaun Watson did was think he was exploring his kink in a safe – and most importantly discrete – environment. I think the mistake that he made was believing that he was expressing himself with sex workers who understood themselves to be in fact sex workers.

I can't say whether the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct think of themselves in one way or another. I can't say whether they express themselves in one way or another. I can't say that I've made any attempt to get to know either those public faces which have been shown or those private accounts which have been found. I dissociated in a big way from all of this. I read as much as I could until I couldn't anymore and I hiberanted on it for six months.

And then he got traded and I had to ask myself genuinely: Am I going to boycott half of the games that are shown in my local area? But even more than that, am I going to abandon a lifetime of emotional investment in the Browns just because Deshaun Watson is playing for them? Am I going to let this thing, all this speculation, all these conversations we aren't and can't be having – I mean, I'm 13 pages into this and I've scratched the surface, not even the surface – I've disturbed the dust that's gathered on the surface of these conversations over the last 300 years and more – barely....

Am I going to let all of that ruin my ability to enjoy the Browns finally maybe actually being pretty good?

That wasn't an easy question to answer. Because the initial inclination is sure. I haven't sought out Browns games at any point in my life, so it's not like I'm actually sacrificing something. But watching them (and enjoying their success) would be to sacrifice something: my ability to say that I stand on any particular High Ground.

And that shook me. Not because I'd lose the High Ground and I don't want that. Because I realized I'm standing on Moral High Ground at all – above Deshaun Watson. On the assumption that he's a rapist. When I know I've done things with my dick that could put me in his position. Maybe not with 40 women, but come on. With girlfriends. We were all 25 once. We all have made a sexual advance or a sexual comment at someone who didn't want it. And usually the reason it's unwanted is because the question was asked in the wrong way or at the wrong time. Not because the asking itself is itself some great Evil.

But that's a whole conversation.

Because the way you ask indeed matters.

I was once asked by a superior at work why she couldn't see my dick through my pants. She said my ass looked nice, but she wanted to see some sausage.

What the fuck.

She would tell me if I complained that a man can't be sexually assaulted by a woman.

But two juries found no wrong-doing.

So we have to evaluate that, I think. What does that mean? Well, if we re-evaluate that Grand Juries are designed to convict – or rather revisit that I heard someone credible say it so we can be reminded of it – we have to ask what it means that they didn't convict Deshaun. I think it's because everyone on that court is guilty of the same behavior.

Which leads me to think that the victim here might actually be Deshaun. Whether he misconducted himself or not, he thought he was in a business exchange. That seems pretty clear. He thought he was expressing himself sexually in a safe environment. And I can't help but think of those times my Safe Environment has been violated, and how I felt about that. And I can't help but think about how this is all so very much like a gender-inversion of the Scarlet Letter. Less that he got a woman pregnant and that somehow shames him, but that he got caught in the Rockstar Lifestyle and now we're going to punish him for all those guys and gals in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s and the turn of the century who took advantage of their wealth and power to take advantage sexually of those in their power.

In other words, I think we are punishing Deshaun Watson for the crimes of Donald Trump.

He looks an awful lot like someone we've decided to sacrifice to the altar of public opinion. This all feels like it wouldn't look out of place atop the Temple of Kukulcán in Chichen Itza. Or on a crucifix at Gulgotha. Or any of the witch pyres of the Middle Ages and following the Reformation. Or really any American lynch mob.

Deshaun Watson is a perfect fall-guy for sexual misconduct.

And for that reason I've wondered from the beginning whether all of this isn't bankrolled and orchestrated by the Texans' owner – either to keep him silent about his reasons for not wanting to play with the team in Houston, and which we still haven't learned; or to so thoroughly discredit him when he does come out with his information that, effectively, he Never plays in this town again?

I wonder.

Because Deshaun Watson is a successful, young, apparently Upright, black man. And that's a dangerous thing to a billion year-old White American billionaire.

No. I smell something fishy, and it's not Deshaun's fingers if you catch my drift.

Too many people too rightly want to fight for too-right causes. And the NFL is a perfect place for them to do it.

Which is why Deshaun's silence is so conspicuous.

According to the rules of our society, you come out swinging when an accusation is made against you. You get demonstrative. Performative.

I was watching Metalocalypse last night because why not? (I “hate you all, you brainless mutants...”) Pickles the Drummer is going through a personal crisis in one episode because the fans think he's only being performative about “how much he drinks.” That is, that he's lying, making the claim of being a dangerous alcoholic for Likes. This was in 2005 – before Likes. But the experience is exactly the same.

There's a reason many of our Rock and Metal legends have consumed themselves to death when they haven't eaten a bullet.

It's not their pre-existing mental illness. It is 100% the fans.

Kurt Cobain told us as much. Well. He also told us the thought of his daughter finding happiness made him want to die. So, maybe it is the pre-existing mental illness and I'm still trying to convince myself suicide isn't the only answer. (While listening to Alice in Chains. So.)

And you know what?

It's goddamned conspicuous that Deshaun Watson hasn't said anything.

There are only two ways to prove that you are not the person someone accuses you of being. This is something I have wrestled with my whole life, and maybe that's why I keep devoting words to articulating these feelings. (We're up to 4061 so far!) The conclusion I have come to is that you can either argue with your words that your accuser is wrong – this in the Societal sense is the purpose of lawsuits and litigation; why we have a professional Law division of our civilization-at-large.

Or you can argue with your behavior.

An actually righteous person runs into a problem when a false accusation – or an unjust accusation – is made against them. I'm sure I could relate this to a book of Plato's Republic if you really wanted some authority with antiquity. There is a directly proportional relationship between a righteous person arguing with their words that they are, in fact, righteous, and the attention paid by the world to their behavior. Specifically their past bad or marginal behavior. Because that's all there is to talk about at that point.

The inverse happens when they say nothing, however. We stop paying attention to their behavior and we laser focus in on the words they have said. Because, again, that's all there is to talk about. You can't talk about the alleged behavior because if you come out too strong and it turns out he's proven completely innocent of all charges and that his accuser was in fact unjust, then you're looking at a warranted libel suit. I mean, I'm not, because what does Deshaun Watson care about what I think about him?

But the reason I haven't said anything I can't take back, and what I continue to remind myself of, is that I can't know, I can't really speculate, and sex in confusing enough without introducing money to the situation.

So this is the conclusion I've come to, and you can join me or not: the accusations against Deshaun Watson have hurt me deeply. They have confused me about my feelings about the NFL and about myself and my victim status. The reactions of the world have made me doubt myself and my institutions and my communities. Whatever aberrant thing Deshaun Watson did, whether it was soliciting prostitution where it wasn't appropriate or getting exposed for exploring his kinks in what he thought was a Safe Space, Deshaun Watson did not hurt my feelings. He did not wrong me. The people in my life who have wronged me have wronged me. The systems which have wronged me have wronged me. But Deshaun Watson is not those people. And he is not those systems. He is antithetical to those systems.

I think he believes it when he says that he never disrespected any woman.

And to the best of my reckoning, there were women who said No thanks and to whom he said Okay, then. And I think he might be right. Is it disrespectful to offer a professional money to do what is customarily expected of them - with or without knowing whether they are "comfortable" with it? I wasn't "comfortable" climbing in that lady's car to put her groceries in the back seat for her. But I did it. Does entering a business agreement you don't want to be in entitle you to massive profits in the future?

That leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And I think it did with the juries, too.

Why doesn't he apologize, then? Because requesting forgiveness you don't want, for a crime which you did not commit, is to be a martyr. Saying nothing, continuing to live his life, having been spared the scourging of Pontius Pilate's soldiers, is the only option Deshaun has. So when he says that he's going to do his best to continue to do Good in the community, I can only believe him. And that means I can only hope.

Hope that he won't hurt anyone (again, if he ever has). Hope that he will do Good for more people than who were directly (or, like myself, indirectly) hurt by this whole Circus. Hope that he proves himself right someday. And me.

And that means I have to forgive him in a meaningful way.

Because while it's a meme and the fun thing to do right now is to pick on the Browns for this, I've never been a fan of following the meme or doing the fun thing. I've always enjoyed doing my own thing, my own way, seeing the world how I see it and representing that honestly. So I'm happy to say that I want to forgive Deshaun Watson his part in the turmoil I've felt over all of this.

And I want to ask his forgiveness for scapegoating him, one way or the other.

I hope you can find it in you to do that, too. I think we'd all be happier if we could do that.

…

I can't end like that.

Maybe we should try something new. That's what I'm suggesting. Ruining Louis C.K. at the height of his comedy powers didn't better the world. The world has fewer quality jokes in it, now. Now everybody just makes mean-hearted jokes at his expense and the room laughs whether they agree they should be laughing or not.

Maybe if our actions weren't so ugly we wouldn't think our hearts were so ugly. And if our thoughts weren't so mean we wouldn't revel in meanness done to others.

Ruining Deshaun Watson's career isn't going to end rape any more than electing Barack Obama president ended racism. In fact, it might entrench the problems that go to the core of our misunderstandings about consent and where the line is between rape and Date Rape. Where the line between Criminal activity and Civil misconduct actually is – and how wide it is.

We aren't having that conversation. We're too afraid. I should have been. Then, by the time I've gotten here, I would have a trail of breadcrumbs to Show My Work as my teachers used to say. Getting the right answer but it appearing out of nowhere is how nobody believes you got the right answers. Or that the answer is right in the first place.

A promise I keep making to myself to commit to making to you and keep falling short of.

Sort of.

It's probably all there if you were looking for it. In my other work.

Anyway, thank you for making it this far. This is by a long shot my longest piece on this blog. I have another longform like this coming about the Tyreek Hill trade to Miami. I've been sitting on it just-because. I lost a little momentum on the feelings that went into the piece when the internet went out and I had a day to convince myself I was getting all worked up over nothing.

So that'll be out soon.

Thank you again for making it here. And if you think I'm wrong, know that I'm doing my best to be empathetic of everyone involved. Everyone, that is, who isn't making a pure fiduciary profit off this whole thing – even if that means the alleged victims.

Which hurts me. But it's true.

Do I deserve a portion of the incomes of those people who have wronged me across my life? Do you?

I don't know. I really don't. But thanks for giving me an audience to work this stuff out to – with, if you say hi and tell me I'm an asshole and fucking retarded and a shill for the Rape State.

I love you, too. And I'll talk at you, soon.